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The original site was designed by Mikko Hyppönen and deployed by Henrik Rydberg. It was later upgraded extensively by Dan Balis. The current layout was designed by S. Abbas Raza, building upon the earlier look, and coded by Dumky de Wilde.

But doesn't the "writer's imagination" also conflict with the "imagination of the state" in a liberal capitalist democracy? This was broadly the subject that John Updike was asked to speak on at a PEN conference in New York in 1986. Updike delivered – to what Rushdie, also in attendance, described as a "considerably bewildered audience of world writers" – a paean to the blue mailboxes of the US Postal Service, which, he marvelled, took away his writings with miraculous regularity and brought him cheques and prizes in return.

EL Doctorow was irritated enough by this gush to suggest to Updike that if "he goes around the corner" from his mailbox, "he'll find a missile silo buried in the next lot". Rushdie himself went on to accuse American writers, much to Saul Bellow's exasperation, of having "abdicated the task of taking on the subject of America's immense power in the world".

Both Rushdie and Doctorow were trying to point out that the American writer held an uninformed and complacent view of his heavily militarised – indeed, insanely nuclearised – state.